Successful full-time traders - anonymous interviews for a serious book

This is a discussion on Successful full-time traders - anonymous interviews for a serious book within the General Trading Chat forums, part of the Reception category; congrats. i am a reader of richard beddard's blog so have been looking forward to this. still can't get the ...

Are any of the 12 traders people who you came into contact with via this forum?

No! But I do have one hardcore day-trader...

11. Khalid: The day trader

"Amongst long-term investors, day traders do not have a good reputation. They tend to be thought of as people with short attention spans and short survival periods. Khalid fulfils the first of these expectations: he makes 30 to 40 trades in contracts for difference (CFDs) every day and almost all of his positions are closed within a few hours. He carries few positions forward at 4.30pm, ending each day largely flat and holding mainly cash overnight. Although his wealth is comparable to several people in this book, his dealing turnover is vastly larger – he trades over £30m worth of shares every month. . After more than a decade of full-time trading, he appears to be an example of a phenomenon which many long-term investors doubt can exist: a day trader who has demonstrated long-term survival, and in recent years enviable success...."

“This book profiles 12 private investors. Each of them has accumulated £1m or more – in most cases considerably more – mainly from stock market investment. Six are ‘ISA millionaires’ who have £1m or more in a tax-free Investment Savings Account (ISA), a result which is arithmetically impossible without exceptional investment returns.”

Firstly, well done on the book writing. Something i could never do.

So names, accounts sizes and previous occupations etc have been changed to anonimise the interviewees. Did they all really become millionaires or is that just a blurb to attract newbies to buy the book?

So names, accounts sizes and previous occupations etc have been changed to anonimise the interviewees. Did they all really become millionaires or is that just a blurb to attract newbies to buy the book?

Names and some previous occupations have been changed. Account sizes have not been systematically changed, they're just rather vague.

People of this level of wealth are quite reticent about the exact level, even with weak anonymity. However, I believe they are all easily millionaires. I believe five almost certainly have more than £10m.

Apart from what they told me, these five are all named from time to time in announcements of holdings >3% in single companies. I think it implausible that someone will pop up with 5% of company A worth £2m, 4% of company B worth £1m, etc (where company A and B are unrelated) - unless their overall wealth is circa £10m+.